Migration

I lay awake a while back having returned recently from Paris by way of Dublin pondering why we sleep, a question I thought long ago routed by the much deeper why do we wake at all, when it came to me from that other brain: we sleep to digest.

This website apparatus also benefits from having content pushed through it from one end (the text box I’m typing in right now) to the other – the screen or notification or implant by which you are reading this now.

I’ve moved the blog-powered stuff to a dedicated hosting service (wpengine) and am hoping this tames some of the memory issues I’ve seen over the past few years. The monitor at the old location (rackspace) is still alarming me, but I don’t know if it is telling me the new site (this one) is having the same problems the old one was having and tripping the alarm by appearing at the same URL, or if it is telling me that thieves are once again burgling my basement.

Typepad is cool. I beta-tested it, I’ve been a member since 2003. But I don’t really need it. I host my own MT blogs and there’s WordPress and so on. The blogs I set up on TP to test it suffer from neglect. Recently I was reminded of TP and went to log in only to learn that my account was in arrears. I paid for another month, but now I’m exporting the contents of my three blogs over there and will import them into two blogs over here.
The technical blog I set up over there, “Stealing Sheep,” will be imported into RFB, as it mostly consists of posts about Typepad and a few about FOAF and RDF.
The music blog, “Layer of Meta,” will become a category of wake up!, personal, journal-type weblog.
The photoblog, “Mr. Spontaneous,” will be folded into the “seen” category of the aforementioned wake up!
That is all.

Part of the reason to upgrade plaidworks and migrate it from in-house to a hosted solution was to stop spending all of my time working on server-level patches (maintenance, upgrades, etc, etc, etc), so I can (hopefully) focus more on content, and perhaps sleeping, or going to the gym, or… having a life. having made the decision to stop running my own server (for the first time since 1995 — we’ve had IP in the house for ten years now), I started thinking about it, and outsourcing the blogs to Typepad just seemed to make sense; it’s a major part of the system I won’t have to maintain, just like I don’t have to maintain the OS. So it simplifies my life even more. I spent some time playing with TypePad (30 day free tests are nice!) and decided I liked it.

Question: if Chuq Van Rospach is no longer maintaining his own weblog server, what business do I have maintaining one myself? Should I switch over to Typepad too?

DailyKos is a hugely popular left-leaning political weblog with a very active comment section. It originally ran on Movable Type but developed growing pains as the readership (and commentariat) expanded. A few months ago, Kos transitioned to Scoop, the open source codebase that underlies kuro5hin, is designed for community participation and collaborative filtering of content – essentially the group weblog model most often associated with Slashdot.
Readers have to set up a (free) account and log in with their username to comment. This creates a persistent identity and helps foster longer-term relationships emerging among the readers and writers. The diary feature enables readers to post their own thoughts and assemble their own scrapbooks of memorable information. Readers can vote a diary entry up to the front page (I believe). It’s not a bad way to start blogging with a built-in community and little expense overhead.
I’ve been reading Kos for a while, so I made sure to grab the “xian” login when he switched over to the Scoop format. Recently, though, I noticed that one’s diary is a custom URL (for example, my diary‘s address over there is xian.dailykos.com), which seemed pretty cool, so I went to my (empty) diary page there and thought it looked kind of sad.
I was reading this World o’ Crap thing on Woodruff and Dean and it made me so happy that instead of posting something to Edgewise or Oakland for Dean, I went over and posted it on the diary.
Now the funny thing is that I checked back a little while later while my diary entry was still featured in the recent sidebar on the Kos homepage, and I couldn’t help noticing that 17 people had commented on my entry. I doubt 17 people a day read my political screeds over at Edgewise.
So, I was curious about my link to WO’C. I went and looked at her referrer traffic and (as of this writing) she has 29 hits coming from that little diary entry of mine. Yes, I realize that it was a drop in the bucket for her, but it was still in the top ten of her referrers that day (currently today, 12/12). Yes, I realize she has more political writing and comedic writing talent in her little pinkie than I’ve got in my whole two thumbs, but still, I’m just saying, it’s interesting.
I think anyone contemplating starting a new blog (of the liberal persuasion) might do well to consider starting it as a diary at Kos. You’d be able to garner an audience more quickly than in many other contexts, and you could always relocate later, or shill a different site for “in-depth analysis” or whatever else yo do. You could do that here among Salon Bloggers too, though it would be nice to have some of the mechanisms of crosstalk and self-moderation built into these community weblog, collaborative media, newsfilter type things.